


Gotta Get Up, Gotta Get Out

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Russian Doll Fusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-24 02:40:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18160394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: “Listen asshole,” Rey says as she steps through the door of Poe’s deli.  “You have exactly as long as it takes me to buy these cigarettes.”Ben doesn’t waste a second breathing.  “Metaphysically speaking, you and I are intrinsically and inexplicably linked,” he starts because there’s no time for beating around the bush and besides, Rey can sniff out a lie like no one else.  “And I'm convinced our true purpose is to to connect with each other, if not help save each other's lives.”  She’s opening her wallet and handing Poe a ten.  “In another world, hopefully you are doing the same for me.”





	Gotta Get Up, Gotta Get Out

**Author's Note:**

> Hella fucking spoilers for S1 of Russian Doll (ie, I jack a whole hell of a lot from it) so if you plan on watching that and hate spoilers, skip this one and come back to it after you’ve watched! 
> 
> Suicide/death is a theme in this one, so I’m putting a general trigger warning on this fic for that subject! I didn’t tag “major character death” though both Ben and Rey die multiple times because they also re-alive multiple times.

She looks up and sees her reflection in the mirror.  A little pale, a little anxious, but that’s her face staring at her out of the glass.

_Oh thank god._

It’s back.  It’s back which means that—

There’s a knock that bursts through that creepy blue vagina art of Rose’s on the bathroom door, someone waiting to get in for a piss and Rey opens it.  The girl standing there has blonde hair wrapped in two little buns at the top of her head and Rey grins at her and throws her arms around her neck in delight because she’s back.  “Hey!”

“Happy birthday!” says the stranger, a little surprised.

“Good to see you again!”

“And you!” the stranger replies with awkward wide-eyes that scream _have we met I don’t think we’ve actually met,_ but Rey’s already brushing past her.

Finn’s apartment is huge, and full of people, full to bursting.  There’s smoke in the air, music, loud chatter, and everything is the way it was the first time that Rey died.  

_Beebee?  Beebee baby!_

_Someone screams._

_Glass crunches._

_Rey’s neck snaps._

“Who’s my birthday baby!” Finn has that spiked cigarette dangling from his lips as he finishes the seasoning of the chicken.  He tilts his head so that Rey can kiss his cheek. She does. Finn’s safe, Finn’s alive, and the fruit on his kitchen island is—

Fresh and whole.  

The mirror’s back.

 _“What do time and morality have in common?  Relativity.” Ben’s eyes are so bright they’re positively glowing gold with excitement.  “They're both relative to your_ experience _. I need a visual aid.”_

_He crosses over to her kitchen with the horrible, moldy oranges sitting in the bowl that Rose had made her at her pottery class and grabs one, and one of the knives from Rey’s knife block.  “All right, so our universe has three spatial dimensions, so it's hard for us to picture a four-dimensional world.” He picks up one of the oranges and Rey’s stomach cringes. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to touch them.  Rotten fruit makes her think of—makes her remember—or rather makes her try to forget._

Come back!

 _“In a two-dimensional world,” Ben continues, “this orange is a circle.  In a three-dimensional world, it's a sphere. But in a_ four-dimensional _world, it's still ripe.”  And he slices through it and hands her the perfectly ripe orange.  She stares at it. Fresh and sweet and good enough to eat. Not dumpster diving.  Not even a little bit. “Time is relative to your experience. We've been experiencing time differently in these loops.  But this, this tells us that somewhere time, linear time, as we used to understand it, still exists.”_

Rey gets a shiver down her spine.

“You feel older yet?” Finn asks.

“I can’t stay.  I have to find Ben,” she blurts out.

_“I think I’m having a heart attack.”_

_“Rey—meet me at the deli.  At Poe’s—meet me there, next time.”_

_She can hear Ben’s voice, calm, unpanicked.  Why isn’t he panicking? Can’t he see her too?  Can’t he see her staring at him, small with those hungry eyes and the three buns she used to wear when she was a kid?_

_She’s going mad.  She’s dying and going mad._

“Ben?” Finn asks, picking up the tray of chicken and bending over to put it in the oven.

“You know him?” Does Finn remember?  Finn’s never remembered before. But if the fruit is ripe again, and the mirror in his bathroom is back, then…

“No,” Finn replies.  “I don’t. I invited everyone you’ve ever made eye contact with to this party, but nope.  No Ben. Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Right,” Rey says, peering around.  Yes, there’s Hux in the corner, talking to Phasma on the phone, and in a few minutes she’ll see Geno come through the door, all sweet and _can’t we try again_ and _you shouldn’t be afraid of my daughter, afraid of commitment._

_No, Geno, I’m afraid I’m gonna..._

_Blood is projecting it’s way across the table and spattering across poor little Elsa’s face.  She doesn’t look horrified though. She doesn’t even look confused. Her father is late—in more sense than one, and it’s Rey’s fault, always Rey’s fault—and this crazy ex-girlfriend of his is sputtering blood, choking on glass because there’s a shard of glass in her mouth, a broken mirror, a broken wing mirror.  Broken because she’d thrown a rock at it, trying to get their attention as they’d driven away._

_...drop dead right in front of your daughter._

There are tons of other people around, but the one person she needs to see, the one person she needs to make sure is alive now that everyone’s back—he’s not there.

“I gotta go.”

“You’re ditching your own birthday party to find some guy named Ben?”

“I’m gonna go check with Poe and see if he found Beebee yet,” Rey calls to Finn, who rolls his eyes.

“Well, I guess it’s your party,” he shouts back.  “Just for you. The fruits of my labor. Huge party.  Celebrating you.”

“Enjoy the chicken!” Rey calls back.  She’s not going to lie to Finn, pretend she’s going to see him again tonight.  She might. But she doubts it, somehow. If she can find Ben, if she can just find Ben…

She takes a deep breath when she reaches the top of the stairs.  Ben had got this far plenty of times, had never had any of trouble on the stairs.  Why, if helping one another was the bug in the goddamn system—why had she

_“Listen, asshole can you get out of the—” her foot slips on the polished stone of the stairs and crack goes her head._

_Her coat getting stuck on the railing and crack goes her neck._

_She falls sideways over the banister and down two flights and dies on impact._

been reduced to taking the fire escape?

One foot down onto the next step, and then the next, and then the next.  It seems to be going well this time, but that doesn’t stop her from holding her breath until she’s at street level.  “Ok then!” she says aloud, a grin spreading across her face. Then she walks the four blocks to Ben’s apartment block and jams her finger against the buzzer for a good ten minutes, twenty, fifty, she doesn’t know.  A long time. He doesn’t answer, though. Doesn’t let her in.

He’s not home.

_Come on, Ben, she’s not worth it._

She sighs.  Well, if he’s not in the apartment, and he wasn’t at her party, that means he’s probably gone to the Deli like the last few times.  

“Hey Poe, you seen—” and she sees him there, huge and hulking, picking up a jar of tomato sauce and just fucking letting it drop out of his hands and shatter on the floor.  Ben.  Drunk out of his mind, his eyes too glazed over, his face a mask of numbed misery.

“Ben?” she asks him and he sways.  There’s no recognition at all in his eyes.  It’s like that first night all over again, right before the cab hit her, when she’d gotten distracted and told those guys looking for a place to party to fuck off to an abandoned hardware store halfway across Alphabet City.  

“Ben, are you all right?” she breathes, and her heart breaks.

_He looks down at her.  “Listen, did you not just hear a word I—”_

_“Yes yes, time and morality, relativity, whatever.  Don’t you get it Ben? We’re supposed to help one another.  The fact that we failed to do that is why we’re stuck like this.  The fact that we’re—that I saw you and I didn’t do anything, even though you needed it.”_

_“Hey, don’t beat yourself up.  You wouldn’t be the first to have failed me.”_

_There’s a bravado to his voice that’s hiding that wretched pain, that reason he doesn’t want to go to a therapist, that reason that Phasma cheating on him with Hux had hurt him so profoundly._

“No sign of Beebee,” Poe says and he rounds the counter with the cash register and makes his way towards Ben.  “Listen, Rey, I hate to do this but he’s in a bad way and it’s a friend’s thing.”

“I can help.  I know him?”

Poe stops in his tracks and stares at her.  “You know him.” It’s not a question. It’s a sardonic _you really don’t know him._

“I do.  He’s Ben Solo.  He lives two blocks that way,” she points towards Ben’s apartment, “and his shitty fucking girlfriend doesn’t love him, so he’s drinking himself blind right now.  I can help. Please let me help.”

 _“I remember how I died that first time.  Or I—” He’s shaking. Shaking and trembling and the glassware he owns is all shattered on the floor of his kitchen.  He’s angry. He’s upset. He’s frightened.  All of Rey’s excitement that he’d remembered, that he’d worked out the mystery of that first_ how _shrivels up in her stomach._

_And when he looks up at her, he looks so lost.  “Rey, I killed myself. I threw myself off a fucking building.”_

“Listen, I know you want to help,” Poe says seriously, “But you’re just gonna be in the way, ok?  Let me take care of it from here. Thanks for caring. People tend not to care about him.”

Rey knows that.  She stands there until Poe pushes her gently towards the door, and then her feet take her outside again.  She stands outside the deli for a full five minutes, breathing.

She knows one thing: Poe is not equipped to keep Ben from taking a nosedive into pavement while blackout drunk.  And she’s _not_ going to let that happen so long as she’s alive.

 

-

 

He’s staring at himself in the mirror, his toothbrush sticking out of the side of his mouth.  The towel is soft around his waist, his chest is glistening from the shower he just took and he’s brushing his teeth.

Because the first time, he was going to go propose to Phasma, and she’d ended up breaking up with him.

Now—

The mirror’s back.  The mirror’s back and he can see himself and it had been gone the last time, gone and so was Poe, just like how many others at this point when they’d gone to the deli and Rey’s lungs had stopped working.  

He finishes brushing his teeth, goes to get dressed, ignoring the half-packed suitcase with the engagement ring sitting on top of it.  

But it’s when he checks the fish tank that he pauses.

The fish is back, swimming away happily, as though it had never been gone.

“Oh, little buddy!  I missed you!”

That means he’d been right.  He’d been right which can only mean—

_“This time we might die and not come back.”_

The memory of Rey’s face hangs in the fore of his mind.  Her bright eyes, her determined derision. From her lips, he believed it when she called him a monster that first time.  And then again, when she’d told him he wasn’t.

He glances at his kitchen counter.  

The bananas are ripe.

“We did it,” he breathes excitedly.

He feeds his fish for the first time in however many deaths, he grabs his coat and prepares to go out into the night.  Then, on second thought, he goes back into the bedroom and pockets the ring. Just in case.

 _Don’t be stupid,_ he tells himself.  It’s not like that with Rey.  And it’s certainly not like that with Phas—not anymore, anyway.  Rey doesn’t want to be with anyone, doesn’t want to have someone who’ll leave her behind.   _I won’t leave her behind._

_Unless I die for real._

But he’s not going to do that.  For the first time in—well, he can’t very well say days, but the equivalent of that, somewhere else on this scatterplot of the fourth dimension that he and Rey have been dancing around for the last hours of their lives—he feels calm.  He feels centered. He has a purpose.

He has to find Rey.

He leaves his apartment and makes his way to Finn’s place.  The party is already in full swing when he gets there, darting his way past several people on the staircase that Rey’s always too afraid to actually take.  She’s good at climbing, but he hopes that when she lives through the night, through the next, and the next, and the next, that maybe she’ll consider taking the stairs.

“Jess!” Ben says when he sees her there just inside the door.

“Have we…?” Jess says as politely as she can, waving the drink in her hands to indicate an _I’m tipsy, sorry if I’ve forgotten you._

“Ben.  Friend of Rey’s,” he says.  “Have you seen her?”

He catches a glimpse of Hux, lying on Finn’s couch, talking into his phone.   _He’s talking to Phas right now,_ Finn thinks.  He remembers decking him in Finn’s living room, starting a fight, breaking the weasel’s nose.  He finds, though, that he doesn’t care. He just cares about finding Rey.

“She left a few minutes ago, I think.  I heard Finn telling Rose.”

“Left?” Ben frowns.  It’s not _abnormal_ for her to ditch the party during her loops, but they’d agreed—given her penchant for dying on that staircase—that maybe this time she’d wait for him here.

Unless they go to the deli.

She probably went to the deli.

“Right.  Cool. Thanks,” and he turns and leaves.

Poe’s alone in the deli by the time Ben shows up, and he grins when he catches sight of him.  “Hey man, how are you doing?”

“Fine,” Ben says a little distantly.  No, there’s no sign of Rey down the two small aisles.  She would have seen him come in. Unless she’s looking for Beebee.  So he goes to the back and pokes his head through the door labeled _Employees Only + Beebee._ The food bowl is full.  There’s no sign of the dumb orange and white cat.

“You haven’t seen Rey, have you?” he asks Poe when he returns to the front.

“You know Rey?” Poe asks with a grin.  “No way, small world.”

“Yeah,” Ben says.  “You haven’t seen her, have you.”

“It’s her birthday, she’s probably up at the party.”

“I was just there, but she wasn’t—”

“You didn’t, did you?” Poe’s got this _you fucked her_ look in his eyes, a twinkle-eyed grin.

“No.  It’s not like that.  I mean it was—once—but it was casual, you know?”

_God she’s so—_

_She’s smaller than Phasma, and warmer, and her kisses are like fire against his lips.  He feels so fucking alive with her, and he should know. He’s died fifteen times in the last three hundred and thirty six hours._

_When she sinks onto him, she’s hot and wet and he groans because on a tactile level, she doesn’t feel_ that _different from Phas.  She’s warm and tight yet soft around his dick.  But holy fuck, sex with Phas was never like this, even when they both weren’t miserable.  Rey’s eyes have fluttered closed, there’s a flush on her cheeks and when he pulls her down to kiss him, she kisses him.  She kisses him with tongue, and saliva, and little moans as she slides along his length and holy fuck, holy fuck, holy_ fuck.

Ben ignores the ring in his pocket.

“Yeah, it’d have to be with Rey,” Poe says.  He leans back, crossing his arm, that dumb crooked smile still on his face.  “Rey. For real?”

“Have you seen her?” Ben asks again.

“Nah.  Party, remember?”

“She wasn’t—”

“Then she’ll be in soon to check in on Beebee,” Poe says, shrugging.  “You can hang out till then.”

Ben doesn’t believe in fate.  Or at least, he doesn’t believe in fate this way.  Whatever it is that’s drawn him to Rey, that’s pushing them to help one another—he believes in whatever the fuck that is.  But the happenstance of her coming through the door right as Poe finishes talking? That’s just happenstance.

Fucking Hux has his arm wrapped around her and she’s not lucid.  

“Rey?”

“What’s it to you?” she asks, and there it is.  He’s never seen it, not until now, not even when she’d kicked him out of her apartment, screaming and trembling and naked because he’d brought up her parents.  That had been salt in a wound—accidental, but painful. This is walls.

_“You don’t know me, but I’m not easy to get to know,” Rey tells him._

_They’ve died twice now, and she’s sitting in his apartment as though it’s her own right now, her ankle resting on her opposite knee, her eyes bright and inquisitive._

_“Oh is that a fact?” he mutters._

_“Yeah, I don’t let people in.  I don’t trust people. People take advantage of trust when you trust them.  Easier to have no expectations at all. Or at least the expectation that they’ll hurt you.”_

_Ben thinks of Phasma, thinks of Uncle Luke.  It makes a modicum of sense, coming from her lips._

She doesn’t recognize him.  And she doesn’t care. Already, she’s turning back to Poe.  “Poe. Show us your best condoms, please.”

“I’m so glad you’re alive,” Ben says as though she hadn’t turned away.

He takes a step towards her but she’s always had fast reflexes.  Death had only barely gotten the better of her more than once. “Hey, a little space, please.”

“You seriously don’t remember me?” Ben asks her.

“I’m sorry, man,” Poe tells him.

Ben ignores Poe, ignores Hux.  The only thing he cares about right now is Rey.  “We die, we come back, and now we’re trying to figure out how to make it stop.”

“Oh my god,” Hux says, rolling his eyes.

“Seriously, man,” Rey bites out and her face is positively brutal now.  “You’re freaking me the fuck out.”

“If you’re not the Rey who remembers me, you could die permanently.”

_She’s the only one in the elevator who isn’t lying on the floor, clinging to it in the hopes that, when it lands, it won’t kill them.  She’s staring at him, incredulous. “Didn't you get the news? We're about to die!”_

_Something in the way that she says it, though.  There’s something—like she doesn’t expect to die—or perhaps, that she does, just the way he does.  “It doesn't matter. I die all the time.”_

“I need you to remember me.  Please.” He’s holding out a hand to her, but it’s like he’s invisible.

“I need you to back the fuck up,” Rey tells him, her voice low, her eyes hard.

“Do you know this guy?” Hux asks.  

“No,” she says at once.

“I know her better than you do, Hux,” Ben snaps.

Hux frowns.  “Do we know each other?”  What wouldn’t he do to wrap his hands around Hux’s throat, choke the life out of him.  Who cares what life in prison means if Rey’s alive. Also chances are they’d die again and end up right back here anyway, fruit be damned.

“You’re fucking my girlfriend,” he says, wishing the words carried the impact of his fist that time he’d decked Hux in the fucking face.

“I haven’t fucked her yet,” Hux says, amused at his own wittiness.

“I’m not your girlfriend,” Rey snaps at Ben.

“Not her,” Ben tells Hux.  “One of your grad students.”

“Bazine?” Hux asks.

Ben’s face contorts in disgust.  “Oh my god, you really are such a fucking dick.”

“Not a deal breaker for me,” Rey says quietly.  “Come on.”

“We didn’t get the condoms,” Hux says, glancing at the display that Poe has unlocked in order to sell them one of the little boxes.

“Also not a dealbreaker,” Rey says.  She’s grabbed Hux’s hand and is dragging him out of the deli.  

“Rey!” Ben takes off after them because no, no, no—no this can’t be happening, he can’t let her do this.

“Listen, fuck off, man,” Rey shouts over her shoulder.  Hux has his arm around her waist.

“You’re going to get hit by a car and die tonight!” Ben yells after her.  She doesn’t look back as she gives him the finger.

Ben follows at a distance.  He crosses the street so he’s walking alongside the park. He passes homeless Teedo who he’d given his shoes to, passes the girls who had pepper sprayed him that one time when he’d been drunk and out of it, passes the spot where he knows that Beebee is hiding, but he doesn’t actually take any of that in.  His eyes are trained on Rey.

She and Hux pause on a street corner and he feels himself physically convulse watching them kiss.   _Get your hands off her._

How many times had he thought that about Phasma, but he feels it so much more in his gut with Rey than he ever did with Phas.

_“I know about Hux.  I know how it started and why.  I want you to be just be whoever you are.”_

_“I didn't know how to tell you.”_

_“You did.  You did tell me. I just didn't listen. You told me every time I asked you what was wrong, and you said, ‘Nothing.’  Every time I touched you, you gently pulled away. No matter how much we think we're fooling people, our bodies can't keep lying the way that our minds can.”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Mine stopped lying a long time ago.”_

_“For years, I've just been I've just been hollow.  You know, I thought if I if I worked hard enough, if I kept putting the time in, and if I kept my head down, you know, did everything right, I this aching, gnawing feeling of being an absolute failure would just would just go away.”_

Rey never once made him feel like a failure.  And he’s not going to fail her. He’s not.

They pause to make out by the basement entrance to Rey’s apartment and Ben snaps a picture on his phone.  He texts it to Phasma—who is probably wondering _where he is_ because they’re supposed to be leaving town together right now and it’s not like him to miss a train, to skip out on anything he’s been planning.   _Call Hux now._

He watches as Hux pulls his phone out of his pocket, watches as he puts it back in his pocket, and ignores the call, watches as Rey and Hux go into her apartment.

“No,” he groans.  “No, no, no.”

 _“They made me feel worthless, ok?” Rey says.  “Like I wasn’t worth anything to them, like I’d never amount to anything because of them.  And we tell ourselves a lot to get through the day. We make friends, we do well at our jobs, but there’s nothing in the world like being told to eat shit by your own parents, you know?”  She’s crying, and shuddering, and can she tell that her words are a knife in the gut? That he’s standing there, numb, because on the one hand, he knows his parents love him, that they want what’s best for him, but he doesn’t think they_ see _him, doesn’t think they understand what_ what’s best for him _even means.  “Took me a long time to even acknowledge that they abandoned me.  How fucked up is that?_

_“Anyway, that’s why I fucked Hux, ok?  Because sometimes you feel worthless on your birthday and anyone’ll do to make you feel alive.”_

He doesn’t even realize he’d been sprinting back to the deli until he’s face to face with Poe.  “I need you to call Rey,” he tells him.

“Oh for fuck’s— _Ben_ .  You need to stop.  You’re really creeping her out.  You’re really creeping _me_ out.”

“I know her.”

“Why don’t you call her then?”

_“I should get your number,” he tells her.  “It’ll be easier if we call one another.”_

_“Nah, it’ll just reset every time we die,” Rey replies.  “A fucking chicken wing. You know, I thought the stairs outside of Finn’s apartment would be the worst, but no.  No, my own food killing me is the worst.”_

“Tell her you’ve found Beebee.  She’ll come.”

“Ben, I’m not—”

Ben writes down Rey’s phone number on a piece of paper and shoves it to Poe.  “I know her, ok? I know her number. I know her better than she knows herself right now.  She’s making a mistake that she’ll regret. Please.”

“I’m not telling her I found her cat when I didn’t find her cat,” Poe tells Ben firmly.  “She’ll never come back here again, and I happen to fucking like that cat, so if she finds it that’ll be it for the cat too.”

“Fine,” Ben growls, thinking fast.  There’s got to be something else.

_“Do you have any idea how hard it is, knowing exactly how much money you’re worth?” Ben grumbles into his whiskey.  He’s definitely drunk now. Drunk because he never talks about this. He knows he sounds like a whiny little shit whenever he talks about it.  “Like—woohoo, I’m worth two hundred K, let’s see how I can fuck that up, how I can fail so hard and prove that I’m the bad investment of the family.  Grandma Padme, you should never have made that trust fund for Ben. He’s a waste of fucking space. A failure.”_

_“Ten thousand, nine hundred and fourteen dollars,” Rey says quietly._

_“Huh?”_

_“According to Unkar Plutt, who was my parents’ dealer, I was worth the ten thousand, nine hundred and fourteen dollars they owed him in stolen drugs.”  She looks at him so sadly. She looks so young, so afraid. When had she first heard that—that that was what she was worth? When had Unkar Plutt told her that?_

_She’s worth so much more than that.  Humans are worth more than money._

_“Wanna get out of here?” he blurts out._

_She blinks at him, and brushes angry tears from her eyes.  “Your place or mine?”_

“That’s what I said,” Poe says into the phone, his eyes on Ben.  “A guy here who says he owes you ten thousand, nine hundred and fourteen dollars.”  He hangs up the phone. “She’s on her way.”

Ben practically sags with relief.  

“Ben, what the fuck’s—”

“Look, I know what I’m doing, ok?”  He has no idea what he’s doing, but he doesn’t need to let that drag him down now.  All his fucking life he’s felt like a failure but he swears to god if Rey gets hit by a car tonight he _will_ fling himself off a fucking building.  The one person in his life who’s ever tried to make him feel like he’s valuable and she’s off making herself feel worthless and then getting herself hit by a fucking car.

His heart is hammering in his chest as though it knows how close to dying he is and is trying to convince him to stay the fuck alive.  

He wonders if there’s some version of him off somewhere that is blind drunk and miserable and Rey—the Rey who remembers him, the Rey who cares about him—is trying to keep him from dying too.  

“Listen asshole,” Rey says as she steps through the door of Poe’s deli.  “You have exactly as long as it takes me to buy these cigarettes.”

Ben doesn’t waste a second breathing.  “Metaphysically speaking, you and I are intrinsically and inexplicably linked,” he starts because there’s no time for beating around the bush and besides, Rey can sniff out a lie like no one else.  “And I'm convinced our true purpose is to to connect with each other, if not help save each other's lives.” She’s opening her wallet and handing Poe a ten. “In another world, hopefully you are doing the same for me.”

“Time's up,” she says, and without looking at him, she turns towards the door.

“I know where Beebee is,” he says.  That makes her pause.

“Where?”  Still not looking at him.

“In the park.”

She sighs and turns her head, eyeing him over her shoulder.  “Let’s go get him.”

She’s silent as they make their way down the block.  Once, she would have looped her hand through his arm and smiled at him, but that’s not this Rey.  “How’d you know about the drug debt?” she asks at last.

“You told me.”

“Well, I never talk about shit from then, so it seems weird that I would've told somebody that I don't know that.”

“And I'm telling you we know each other.”  She rolls her eyes at him.

“Ok, fine.  What else do you know about me?”

 _I know you’re afraid that no one likes you, that you’re not worth the energy spent which is why you wall yourself away and don’t trust people.  I know you’re funny, and smart, and caring, and kind. I know you’re stubborn as all fuck._ He lands on, “It’s your birthday, and that’s why you’re freaked out about dying tonight.  Because you’ve been thinking about it long before I told you you’d get hit by a car.”

“Yeah, well…” she mutters.  “The car thing particularly got—”

“Because your parents—”

“Fuck off, man,” she flares at once and just like that she’s not at his side anymore, she’s turning and hurrying down the street.

“Rey!  Rey wait!  I’m sorry.”

“You don’t get to say _anything_ ,” she snaps at him.   

“I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I don’t _want_ to freak you out or anything.”

“Rey!”

Because of course it’s Hux, standing there across the street, his shirt unbuttoned, his hair tousled, his eyes angry.

“Rey, step away from him,” Hux calls.

“I can take care of myself,” she retorts at once and it’s all Ben can do not to smile.   _Never_ tell Rey what to do.

“No,” Hux says firmly.  “I know that guy. He's self-destructive and he's fucking dangerous.”

“He does not seem to like you,” Rey says, almost amused, looking at Ben.

“He's mentally unstable,” Hux continues, reaching his hand out.  “I'm serious. Get away from him. The guy's crazy.”

Rey looks at Ben and there it is, that look of disgust he’d seen how many times?  In his parents’ eyes, in his uncle’s, in Phasma’s. And now, at last, in Rey’s.

“See you never,” she says and she’s not looking as she steps off the curb to cross the street towards Hux, she’s not looking at the light which is telling her not to cross, or the traffic which is slow, but is moving and there’s a cab entering the intersection.  No, she’s looking at Ben.

He’s going to be the last thing she sees before she—

He grabs her arm and tugs her towards him right as the cab honks its horn angrily, frightenedly, because it was about to be driven to vehicular manslaughter or something.

Rey’s staring up at him now, her eyes wide, her pupils blown from the dark, from the adrenaline.

“Did you just save my life?” she breathes.

“Yeah—I—yeah.”

He did.  He saved her.  He kept her alive.

So why is she pulling away from him?  Why, when she talks, does it sound like she’s sobbing.  

“Why?”

“I told you—I know you.”

“I can’t handle this shit.  This is too much for me.” she says and this time she checks both ways before crossing the street.

Before he knows it, she’s gone.  She’s gone, but she’s alive. He feels like he’s falling.  He feels like he’s flying.

 

-

 

She stands on the corner, her eye trained on the door of the deli, a cigarette between her lips.  The nicotine isn’t working. She’s stressed as fuck right now. Any second, Ben could step outside, and Poe could be not with him, and he could go jump off a fucking building.

But when Ben does leave the deli, Poe is with him.  “Stay put,” Poe tells him as he locks the door and then the two of them go off into the night.  Rey follows. Ben’s visibly staggering.

Poe takes him to sober up in a diner two blocks away, orders him a coffee and some food.  Rey slips in and sits at a table a little ways away, watching them.

“It’ll be ok,” Poe whispers.  “You’re better off knowing the truth, right?  Isn’t that what you’ve always said?”

 _“My parents fucking lied to me.”  His voice is hollowed. “They always talked about Grandma Padme, or Bail and Breha Organa.  They never told me about my grandfather. And then, one day, I look him up and boom, there he is.  Did you know he killed a whole batch of school children like some kind of fucking psycho monster? Uncle Luke always said he’d be proud of me—proud of_ what _?”_

_“You’re not your grandfather,” Rey tells him quietly._

_“Nah, but why would I want that motherfucker to be proud of me?  Why could my uncle show more love for him than he could for me?”_

_“I don’t know, Ben.”_

_“I do.  It’s because I’m a fucking failure.”_

_“You’re not—”_

_“I am.  Everyone’s telling me I’m not but everyone’s a liar.  I am.”_

_“I’m not a liar,” Rey flares.  “I stopped lying to myself years ago and I’m not lying to you.  I won’t ever lie to you, even when it sucks.”_

_His eyes flicker between each of hers._

_He looks like someone who wants to kiss her._

_That’s something that people don’t understand: that there’s a difference between looking like you’re_ going _to kiss someone and looking like you_ want _to.  People look like they’re going to kiss Rey all the time, usually right before they do._

 _No one ever looks like they_ want _to kiss her._

“I’m a failure,” Ben’s moaning again.  “A big dumb fuckup failure.” He keeps moaning it and Poe’s doing it all wrong.  He’s letting Ben get a head of steam. He needs to either shout at him or make him laugh but trying to comfort him only makes it worse.  

Which is why it’s a relief when his phone rings, and it’s Kaydel and, _I’ll be just a second, don’t go anywhere_.

Ben doesn’t even acknowledge Poe.  He just sits there staring into the coffee he hasn’t drunk yet.  His big brown eyes are bright with tears, his face is red and contorted and he looks miserable.

He looks fucking miserable, until he doesn’t.  Until his face goes a little blank, then a small smile creeps there.  Like he’s at peace. Like nothing can hurt him anymore than he’s hurt himself.

 _Shit_.

He’s up and out of his seat while Poe’s gone, and he’s drifting out of the diner and Rey’s pelting after him, ignoring the unpaid bill for the coffee she hasn’t even gotten yet.  She’s following Ben towards the park and fuck his stupid long fucking legs.

Up ahead, she sees Teedo asking him for some change and Ben pauses, then digs in his pocket for something.  He hands it to Teedo, then sinks to his knees and a moment later Teedo’s shouting “Yes, yes! A hundred times yes!” and the two men are hugging and laughing and _that’s Phasma’s ring.  Shit._

Teedo leads Ben into the park and Rey hurries after them because if there’s one thing she knows, it’s that Ben’s decided to do it, and if there’s one _other_ thing she knows, it’s that Teedo is the opposite of helpful right now.

She finds them under the hutch in the center of the park, Ben’s inhaling one of Teedo’s joints and she sees one of Teedo’s friends going through his wallet.

“Ben!” she calls and he doesn’t turn around but she doesn’t care.  She slides between him and Teedo and grabs his arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

“He with you?” Teedo asks.

“Yeah, he is.”

“Ok, we’re gonna keep his things,” Teedo calls because Rey’s already almost twenty feet away with Ben in tow.

“Go for it,” she shouts back.  She has the most important thing with her and that’s Ben.  Living and breathing Ben. Ben alive and in her arms Ben.

_There is blood on his knuckles as Rey drags him away from Hux, whose nose is now dripping blood from both nostrils and is most definitely broken._

_“What the fuck, man?” she snaps at him when she slams the door to Finn and Rose’s bedroom behind them._

_“Listen, I know you think I'm a moral narcissist, but there are good guys and bad guys, and I may not definitely be a good guy.  In fact, I’m pretty confident that I’m not a good guy. But that piece of shit,” he gestures his bleeding fist towards Finn’s living room “he is a bad guy.  A truly horrible piece of shit.”_

_She likes this Ben.  The Ben that sticks up for himself, that holds his own in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is, in fact, an asshole._

_Then, his face contorts, twists in a bitterness that’s all too familiar to Rey at this point.  “Did you really have to fuck him?”_

_“Yeah,” Rey mutters.  “Well, I didn’t have to.  No one made me. But I...I had to, you know?  Sometimes you just feel worthless.”_

_“Yeah, I know,” Ben bites out.  But when he looks at her now, there’s no anger left in his eyes.  He looks like he wants to kiss her again, to make it so she never feels worthless again.  God damn it, why doesn’t he kiss her? Even when they fucked, he didn’t kiss her._

_“You were better, by the way,” she says, taking his bleeding hand and leading him and opening the door again.  “I’ll take the moral narcissist over the_ actual _narcissist any day.”_

_She almost thinks she sees him smile._

“What’s wrong?” he slurs at her.  They’re in his bedroom now, and she’s gotten him a bunch of french fries and a huge thing of water.  He’s eating them, but from the way he’s looking at her, she can tell he’s still blackout drunk.

“Ben, I’m worried about you and I’d like to keep you from hurting yourself,” she tells him.

“Mmmmhmmm.  I feel terrific,” he tells her, shoving a handful of fries into his mouth.

“I know what you’re up to, Ben.  And I’m sure you feel fantastic because that’s how a lot of people feel when they’ve decided to kill themselves.  The emotional buoyancy, giving things to strangers, proposing to gutter punks.” His face crumples as she says it, but she’d told him she’d never lie to him, even when it sucks.  So she’s not lying to him now. She knows what it is: the relief that soon it’ll all be over.

And this time, she knows it’ll be over for real.  And she can’t let that happen. She can’t let that happen.  He just needs to make it through the night.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles.  “Can I lay down. My heart’s a little…” he makes a hand wavy gesture and Rey helps him lie down on the bed.  “You putting me to sleep?” he asks her.

“Yeah,” she says.

Then, in a smaller voice, “Stay?”

“I’ll be here,” she tells him, and she curls up on the bed next to him, listening to the sound of his breathing.  

_She’s not surprised, really, that the nice jewelry store lady gets a lot less nice when she realizes that Rey’s not there to shop but rather to track down some guy.  Who’s not her boyfriend, no matter how much Rey lies about it._

_But that doesn’t matter quite so much as the idea that flickers in her mind._

Leave a review on Yelp! _the little card on the counter had said, and straight-laced, clean-cut, dying-too-many-times men carrying engagement ring boxes in crashing elevators seem like exactly the sort of guys who would leave a review on Yelp for good service, right?_

_So she loads up the app, scrolls through the reviews and there he is.  Ben Solo._

_He’s got a nice face, really._

_And she’s going to go find it again._

She wakes to sirens and an empty bed and her heart stops.

How the fuck did she fall asleep?  She hadn’t slept that entire night that she’d watched over Teedo to make sure his shoes didn’t get stolen and he didn’t freeze to death—how the fuck did she fall asleep on Ben—on—

He’s not in the room.

And there are sirens—loud sirens—right out his window.

_No.  No no.  No no._

_Come back._

She sprints up the staircase of his building and bursts onto the roof to find it empty.  “Oh you dumb, dumb motherfucker,” she sobs at herself. She can see the way that lights are flashing from the way the buildings across the street are flickering.  She feels her feet making their way towards the edge. Her eyes, though—they don’t want to look down. They don’t. They don’t, they can’t.

They’re full of tears and they can’t bear the sight that awaits her.  Ben, dead, his body smashed to bits on the pavement below. Forever and ever because she’s still alive.

Her tears are so thick that they’re falling off her face and onto railing under her hands.

“What’s wrong?”

Her hands tighten on the railing.

Ben’s standing next to her.  He’s still drunk, but he looks less blisteringly drunk.  

“I am so fucking happy you didn’t jump,” she chokes out.

He is staring down at the street below now, standing a little too close to the edge.

“You promise if I don’t jump, I’ll be happy?”  So hollow. His voice is so hollow. And she hates saying what she knows she has to say.

“I don’t know, man.  I promised you I’d never lie to you and I don’t know if you’ll be happy.”

He takes a deep shuddering breath and Rey plows on.

“But I can promise that you will not be alone.”

And now he’s crying too, and she’s reaching for his hand and squeezing it so tightly that she wonders if he’s gonna lose blood flow to his fingers.  She finds she doesn’t care. _If you die, I die, ok?_

“Ok,” he manages at last.

“Good.  Now let’s get the fuck off this roof before you change your mind.”

And he nods.

He hasn’t let go of her hand.

She hasn’t let go of his.

 

-

 

“Hey!”

Ben looks up.  Rey’s halfway across the street, a grin on her face.  

“Funny—when you look both ways, they don’t hit you,” she says and she takes his hand and at once he knows that it’s the Rey that remembers him.  The one who he’d looped the past few hours with how many fucking times.”

“Did I—?” he asks her.

She shakes her head, and he feels like every weight he’s ever borne has been lifted from his chest.  He can’t remember—he must still have been too drunk. But she looks like she remembers and that’s enough.  He doesn’t know if he wants to remember.

“So,” Rey tells him.  “You said you knew where my cat was.”

“Yeah, in the park,” he tells her.

“Well, then let’s go.”

She heads off but Ben stands there, planted to the ground.  The cool night air is so fresh in his lungs. Fresh and lifegiving.

Rey’s only a few steps away from him, but she pauses when she realizes that he’s not right next to her.

“Ben?”

And he closes the distance between her, dropping his lips to hers and kissing her hard.  She tastes like cigarettes and whiskey but she also tastes like whatever alive is supposed to taste like.  He wraps his arms around her and holds her close and she sighs into his mouth and presses her hands against his chest like she’s trying to hold his heart.

Ok, so the ring in his pocket might have been one step too far.  It might have been the erratic need of a dying man. It’s also probably cursed because he was going to give it to Phasma, and Rey would probably tell him—not so much to throw it into the East River as to return it and buy her a steak.  But it’s not disappointing at all, to realize the ring isn’t right for tonight.

Rey’s right for tonight, and they’ve got tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after to figure out the rest.  

 


End file.
